Author channels anger in ‘Skinner’

A critic for The Washington Post called Charlie Huston “the voice of 21st Century crime fiction,” and his newest novel, “Skinner,” feels remarkably current: drones, robots, cyber-surveillance, guns made from 3-D printers.

The title character is an emotionally stunted expert in “asset protection,” guarding people others want captured or killed. The asset he’s watching this time is a brilliant data analyst with a fondness for peyote. They’re on the trail of terrorists targeting the U.S. power grid.

Huston is a Los Angeles resident who has also written comic books and TV scripts. He will be at Comic-Con to participate in a Thursday afternoon panel called “Keep ‘Em at the Edge of Their Seats.”

Q: What do you like best about Comic-Con?

A: My wife has come a couple of times with me and she overheard a conversation between two girls. One of them was crying and her friend was saying, “What’s the matter? Are you OK?” And her friend said, “I’m just so happy because I’m here and I just feel like myself when I’m here.” So that’s what I like best about Comic-Con — the genuine joy that I see from so many of the fans for whom it is Christmas and New Year’s and Halloween and their birthday all rolled into one.

The size of it, the overdoneness of it, the overblowness of it — all that stuff I don’t care for at all. Crowds are not really my bag. But I love knowing that for the overwhelming bulk of the people, it’s this wonderful event.

Q: Tell me about the panel you’re on.

A: The way these things usually work is whoever is running the panel makes a general statement about what the idea is and then starts throwing softball questions at us and we all try to sound as clever and amusing as possible. The best-case scenario with these panels when it’s a bunch of writers hanging out — we don’t have any movie stars or anything like that — is that it’s funny. After that, anything else is cake.

Q: I was struck by the title, about keeping readers on the edge of their seats. Is that something you spend a lot of time thinking about?

A: You know, you caught me on a weird day. I decided with this book that I was not going to look at any of the reviews. Good or bad, I don’t really want them in my head. But then today I saw that Alan Cheuse had reviewed the book for NPR. I couldn’t resist that. He had given my last book a really nice review so I thought I’m just going to go to the website and take a quick look. And the headline, right away, is something like Thriller Drowns in Rhetoric. It was awful.

His complaint was that it’s boring. I skipped down, just catching a sentence here and there, and I got to the end of it and I thought, “Well, I’ll look at the last sentence. Maybe he throws me a bone.” And the last sentence is something to the effect of, “Like the drug Dreamer in Huston’s previous novel, this book just put me to sleep.” So, when you ask me if keeping people on the edge of their seats is important to me, that’s what I think about. (Laughter.)